Category Archives: Research

According to Newzoo, the top 100 countries in the world by game revenue includes:

1.7 billion gamers

$81.5 billion in revenue for 2014 this year

The US is the top country for game revenue in 2014 at $20.5 billion

Japan monetizes the most per person online at $120.20

I ran the numbers differently than they did. You can see the ranks of game revenue by country on the left, but I chose to look at it differently. I divided the revenue by the online population of each country. This gave me the RPPO (Revenue Per Person Online) – since I figure this is a good gauge of technology and that these people are also likely playing on mobile devices. Then I ran the ARPD (Average Revenue Per Day) based on that number divided by 365. It results in some interesting data.

For me, this is most interesting for geographic (soft) launches of mobile games. If we can look at how a game monetizes in specific country or two, we can make a more educated guess about how it might monetize given the propensity to spend per country. Of course it isn’t flawless, but it sure does give an interesting set of benchmarks to measure against. Here’s the full list.

I was looking for some data on Cost Per Install (CPI) for games in Japan and a friend of mine who runs a large studio there sent me this link, a blog post by InMobi that I missed in January. It basically sets out the relative cost of mobile installs worldwide. While it isn’t exclusive to games, we can use it to decipher regional costs. To get started, I went over to one of my favorite CPI sites, MobPartner, to check out their scrolling list of live CPI transactions. If you like to watch CPI bidding, it’s the best place to watch the action. Here are a couple pics to illustrate the CPIs today:

As you can see, Empire: Four Kingdoms is buying a lot of installs and they are ranging in the U.S. between $1.90 and $2.40 and hitting $3.05 in the U.K. I would guess the higher priced acquisition in the U.S. is on a better performing network, or more proven ad channel that provides players that either convert a bit higher, or have a higher Lifetime Value (LTV). You need to balance cost with volume in any acquisition campaign, but that’s probably obvious.

So now let’s dig into the InMobi data. We know that their numbers are not just games, so we need to create a reference point.

U.K.

174

$3.31

3.05

U.S.

100

$1.90

$1.75

160.5

The 174 is a number from InMobi on the relative cost per install in the U.K. related to the U.S. Since we know what Goodgame Studios is paying for their users we know the numbers in bold to be true. The InMobi numbers don’t quite match up yet. The difference is 160.5 instead of 174, which is roughly 92.2 percent of the difference. I broke down the numbers with the Relative CPI (R CPI), the Adjusted Relative CPI (AR CPI) and came up with the Actual Game CPI (AG CPI) below. It looks about right to me in terms of acquisition costs. I hope it’s helpful for you too.

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